Rating: 
Summary: Important and entertaining reading.
Review: "The Company" is an big, engrossing novel that succeeds on several levels: First, it is as enjoyable as all get out. Second, it serves as a living history review of clandestine U.S. ventures going back to World War II. And third, no matter what political perspective you come from, you will come away a different take on the War on Terrorism. Robert Littell takes several young men who joined the brand-new CIA after the war and follows their careers. All enter the spy game because their experiences with communism during the war have lead them to believe that it is a destructive element that must be halted. From the same war comes a young communist who as whole-heartedly believes that communism is the salvation of the world. They will fight on different battlegrounds throughout "The Company"--Berlin, Hungary, Cuba, Afghanistan--until communism collapses. In many ways, "The Company" is a standard spy thriller, with ample supply of the requisite secrets, double-crossing, and triple agents. There's an unnecessary Alice in Wonderland theme throughout and some clunky writing. But what makes the book stand out is not just the skill Littell brings to the plot,
but the scope. This is a history of covert activities, and because we see so many major incursions represented, we can watch disturbing patterns develop. It seems that since WWII, the U.S. has entered a number of frays for all the right reasons and withdrawn before the matter could be resolved. "The Company" deals with the spies and civilians left dangling, and raises questions about earlier policies that may have left us vulnerable to terrorists. This is a timely book that I hope will excite discussion and increase understanding. If readers don't agree with Littell's take on events, then I hope they'll do research on their own. "The Company" should encourage readers to take a look at the past, and is a whopping good read to boot.
Rating:
Summary: Comments on book's portrayal of real people
Review: This is a wonderful novel; of course it is fiction, but it portrays many real people. I worked off and on from 1950 to the early '90s with defense and intel groups,and although my contact with CIA was limited, I have personal views about some of the real people, and here comment on how my views match (or don't) Littell's portrayal. First, though, I must observe that neither CIA nor KGB was consistently as clever as the book portrays; like any large organization, CIA and KGB had very many people who were barely competent, if that, along with some who were superb, so the effectiveness of neither CIA nor KGB was as great as that of some less well-known intel groups in both countries that chose and trained fewer people and did it better. That's not a criticism, just an observation about big organizations. In particular, both CIA and KGB suffered greatly from their habit of posting people to assignments where they couldn't speak or understand the local languages and didn't know local customs and courtesies; I met a few of those in surprising places, and wondered what on earth their bosses thought they could achieve. OK, on to real people. The portrayal of Bissell is perfect: a brilliant, hard-driving, opinionated risk-taker who didn't listen well to the views of others. (By the way, Bissell didn't fall on his sword after Bay of Pigs; he wound up with a responsible job that used his talent where he wouldn't do damage.) Richard Helms was much better than Littell's brief description would imply; Helms was indeed usually cautious, and could be bureaucratic, but he fought fiercely to make his considered judgment heard, and was perhaps the most effective person in CIA for many years. It's unfortunate that Kennedy didn't get Helms' carefully reasoned explanation of why Bay of Pigs wouldn't work; that was pigeonholed before it could get to Kennedy, and Kennedy had not yet learned to ask the questions that would have brought Helms' story to his attention. Casey is well portrayed: a fervent patriot with lousy judgment. It's little known that Adm. Bobby Inman, Casey's deputy between Inman's time as NSA Director and Inman's subsequent career, resigned because some of Casey's operations were unacceptable to Inman. (I know this both from Inman and from others.) Angleton deserves better than the portrayal in this book; he was abrasive, eccentric and paranoid, hated by many CIA people, but he did many good things for CIA besides a few bad things. Angleton did not destroy the capability of CIA's Ops Directorate, although he did do a bit of damage to it. The more serious damage, however, was inflicted later by James Woolsey's well-intentioned but ill-advised starvation of humint to emphasize technical means. Tenet tried to repair this, and humint is getting better again now, but that takes time, and unfortunately wasn't far enough along for the Iraq conflict, so Tenet had to take the fall. Littell portrays the KGB's inability to get the Politburo to recognize the facts of life about Afghanistan; I don't know whether Littell means to imply the CIA had the same problem about Viet Nam, but it did. In the late '60s I asked a senior US intel guy why US intel hadn't laid out for President Johnson the true state of affairs in Viet Nam, and he said, "We did, repeatedly, but he wouldn't listen; he didn't want to hear it." A perennial problem for intel shops is that national leaders (and top military people) often don't want to hear what the intel people have to say, for reasons having to do with problems of policy and of leadership; in the US, CIA and other intel shops often get badmouthed for not providing good analyses when in fact they did, but were ignored. I can think of only two post-WW-II Presidents who listened carefully to intel assessments that cast doubts on the President's policy of the time. I know little about Giancana, but I'm surprised if he was as foulmouthed and ignorant as Littell portrays; the few people I have known who were "managers" in organizations that systematically broke our criminal laws had to deal with the "respectable" world, and behaved in a way acceptable to those they dealt with; they left it to their goons to be grossly uncouth. I noted a couple of very minor errors in Littell's description of routine CIA procedures at Langley, but nothing major. All told, he has achieved a remarkably good book; if my comments above seem to conflict with some of Littell's characterizations, keep in mind that there are many knowledgeable people who would agree with Littell and not with me, or who would disagree with both of us.
Rating:
Summary: Revisit the cold war
Review: What fun it is to be thrust right back into the paranoia of the cold war, when the sides were clearly marked and the bad guys were evil and spies had rules by which they fought their dirty battles. This book cannot be put down when it is solidly in the 50's spy years. As it brings us closer to the present day, the stakes are not as high, but by then we care about the characters and are eager to see decades old injustices addressed. Recommended for anyone who loves spy novels, especially if it seems to you that spy novels just don't have much point now that the Soviet Union is gone.
Rating: 
Summary: The $64 trillion Question
Review: I enjoyed this book, and I suggest you read it if you like spy fiction or are curious about the CIA.
I agree that some reviewers below reveal too much of the plot, although the author himself tips the biggest "surprise" withing the first quarter of the book.
As a writer, the author is certainly not John Le Carre, and tends to be clumsy at points, but the story carries the day. The author does make some factual errors, especially anachronisms, but they only hurt for a moment, since the plot is usually engrossing enough to carry the reader past them. There are number of typos that sometimes are annoying, but that is the publishers' fault.
One major quibble. The author glosses over the biggest single fact and failure in the history of the CIA and American policy in the second half of the twentieth century: how could the CIA and the American government miss the fact that the Soviet Union was in a long collapse beginning in the late sixties, and almost ready to implode by 1980? Many many people, both public and private, who visited the Soviet Union recognized and reported that fact. Almost any Russian, speaking privately, was aware of that fact and willing to share it.
The answers are glossed over in the book -- first, intelligence services have to "serve" their political masters, and there were no successful American political figures willing to publicly state that the Soviets were collapsing, and many whose careers were partly built on the notion of the famous "bear in the woods." CIA agents and analysts reporting that the Soviet Union was about to implode would have been looking for other work. Second, after the moles and false intelligence of the fifties and other failures, the US gradually lost interest in human sources and began depending on electronic, spy plane, and satellite data gathering. Unfortunately, those techniques could not tell us that Soviet missiles were falling apart in silos half filled with water, that missile submarines spent so much time in port not because the Soviets didn't trust their officers but because the subs were broken down, that a very large part of the Soviet GDP was either fictional or so defective that it might as well have been, and that the Soviets' military spending peaked in the mid-sixties and declined in real terms despite the large added costs of the confrontation with China and the Afghan war. American taxpayers and American society paid the huge cost in dollars of this mistake, but the book makes no attempt to discuss it, even though it has been widely documented since the end of the Cold War.
That aside, I think the history and portrayal of historic figures is interesting and pretty accurate. The plot is fun and exciting, even when you know how it is going to come out, and the episodic structure allows readers to enjoy an exciting yarn and still get to sleep at a decent hour.
Rating:
Summary: An Epic Story
Review: I owned two copies of this book and even tried listening to an audio version before finally sitting down with a third copy (given to me by a friend who highly recommended the book) and pushed my way through it. Once I got past the first 50 or so pages, where I usually gave up before, the book had me hooked. Robert Littell has written an epic story detailing the rise of America's clandestine services, their early successes, and their eventual mis-steps that would lead to the rise of terrorists like Osama bin Laden. This is a spy novel like no other I've read. At times I found myself riveted to the page, shocked at some of the plot points. This turned out to be a great book and I can only kick myself for not reading it sooner.
Rating:
Summary: Walk the distance, it is worth it
Review: "The Company" has been out for a while, but I have only just come round to reading it. I found it hard to put down, once I read the first 50 pages or so. But then I had to because the book's length makes it difficult to read it in one go.
As with all historical novels you always wonder how close they are based on reality. Characters like Jim Angleton and the Sorcerer/Harvey Torriti (presumably Bill Harvey) should be straight out of reality. On the other hand, you wouldn't mind it to be pure fiction after you discover that one of rising stars in the CIA was discovered to be working for the other side - thirty years after he was hired.
Generally, the book doesn't follow history too closely, but what does one expect. It is a novel. Besides, if Robert Littell had included all the battlegrounds between the CIA and the KGB, this book would come in several volumes.
I don't have any favorite episodes. I loved the whole book. It is great that there are some good spy novels coming out of America.
Rating:
Summary: LITTELL IS HIDING BEHIND THE THIN FINGER OF "FICTION"
Review: Fiction my foot!!!This excellent "work of fiction" smells of a lot of reality!!What truly devasted me was James Jesus Angleton's
swansong when Starik(the Old Man)had succeeded in discrediting
him.Angleton identifies a couple of Western notables who are in the Soviet payroll,among them none other than Averell Harriman.THIS IS TRULY AN EARTH-SHAKING REVELATION!!!Many
would think that this is too far-fetched,but remember that Martin Bormann,Hitler's deputy,was a Soviet agent. Maybe Littell is trying to save his skin from the reputedly murderous COMPANY,but as for me I can see right through his work.
If there's any fiction in this book it would be the embellishment
associated with the agents' adventures in Hungary,Afghanistan,
USSR,etc,etc.This book would have been better off as an actual
history of the COMPANY,not a work of "fiction". I would have also loved an account of the Cuban Missile debacle
and what the behind-the-scenes action was like,but was truly disappointed when that did not materialise.Another startling revelation was the assassination of John Paul the First a.k.a
Albino Luciani.His death was always smelly.When I was a boy in
the early 1990s I read a book titled The Keys of this Blood,and I suspected the COMPANY of having assassinated him.It's highly unlikely that the election of John Paul the Second was free and fair.Remember he was the first non-Italian Pope in more than 400
years,and he worked very closely with the COMPANY in destabilising communist Eastern Europe;not to mention that "His Holiness" has openly boasted of having "shaken the rotten tree of Communism",leading to the demise of the Soviet Union.I was hoping that Littell would at least say something about this. THE COMPANY is a great read but for those who are well read in current world affairs,it was disappointingly inadequate!!!
Rating:
Summary: Almost Brilliant
Review: I genuinely enjoyed reading this lengthy tome. It's quite a book, and the insertion of fictional characters and possible or probable events into real history helped give you the feeling that you were reading the real inside workings of the CIA. It also cleverly laid the blame for some CIA foibles at the feet of fictional characters, enabling the author to explore those events without risking the embarassment of any real people. Unfortunately, two of the most pivotal historical American events that took place during my lifetime were whizzed past in this novel: the Viet Nam war and the assassination of John Kennedy. I guess some things are still too hot to touch. I have one other minor complaint: the White House conversations involving former president Reagan rang false. I watched Reagan on television for eight years, and the figures and patterns of speech assigned to him in the novel didn't fit the reality I remember. He may really have been befuddled, as he is portrayed here, but he continued to speak publicly with confidence and authority even after the assassination attempt. I would have imagined him speaking just as well in an important meeting like the one imagined in the book. For fans of the spy novel, cold war era, I would highly recommend this book. In addition, conspiracy buffs and fans of James Ellroy's American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand will probably enjoy this.
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